Speaking at Cooper Union, Seward dismissed the conflict over the Freedmen’s Bureau as “comparatively unimportant.” He added, however, that it did point up the difference between the president and his “nervous” critics in the House. Johnson had the courage to see that “in this troublesome world of ours,” no one can always have his own way.
“The nervous men, on the other hand, hesitate, delay, debate and agonize”—not because the war did not end as it should, “but because they have not individually had their own way in bringing it to a happy termination.”
• • •
Returning for extemporaneous remarks in Washington, President Johnson ignored Seward’s example of criticizing his opponents in generalities. Instead, the president listed several of his Confederate enemies, beginning with Jefferson Davis, although he went on to say that he had extended “the right hand of fellowship” to Southerners who had renewed their loyalty to the Union.
But, Johnson said, there were other men “opposed to the fundamental principles of this Government, and now laboring to destroy them.”
When voices from the crowd demanded names, Johnson yielded to the provocation.
“You ask me who they are,” Johnson cried. “I say Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania! I say Mr. Sumner of the Senate is another!” Rounding out his list, the president added a crusading Massachusetts abolitionist. “And Wendell Phillips is another!”
The loud cheers emboldened the crowd as well as the president. One man called on Johnson to excoriate his former friend, secretary of the Senate John Forney.
“Give it to Forney!” the man shouted.
“In reply to that,” Johnson replied, striving for a moment of dignity, “I will simply say that I do not waste my time upon dead ducks.”
The exchange had unleashed a torrent of self-pity. Before his hour-long harangue was done, Johnson had referred to himself more than two hundred times.
Describing his tormentors, the president asked, “Are they not satisfied with one martyr? Does not the blood of Lincoln appease the vengeance and wrath of the opponents of this government? Is the thirst still unslaked? Do they want more blood?”
He had no doubt, Johnson went on, that the men he had named intended to incite his assassination. Grieving prematurely over his own martyrdom, the president said that “when I am beheaded, I want the American people to be the witness.” His body should be laid out on an altar dedicated to the Union. That way, “the blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured as a fit libation to the union of these States.”
• • •
Johnson’s speech accomplished what had seemed impossible. For many conservative Republicans, the president confirmed Charles Sumner’s warnings that Johnson, not the Radicals, constituted the true threat to the country.
Senator William Fessenden of Maine had been able to work with Thaddeus Stevens but considered Charles Sumner “a malignant fool.” His detestation became so great that he left his seat ostentatiously whenever Sumner rose to speak. Sumner professed not to understand why Fessenden should take offense when Sumner described the bills he introduced as “shocking to all morals” or as reeking with the “loathsome stench of bad mutton” or as “disgusting ordure.”
After Johnson’s speech, even Fessenden wrote to an ally that the president “has broken the faith, betrayed his trust and must sink from detestation into contempt.”
Such conservative Republican senators as Edwin D. Morgan of New York and William Stewart of Nevada now regretted upholding the president’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau. And, except for Sumner’s unbending nature, the bureau could have picked up another two votes by admitting Colorado to the Union.
Sumner, however, objected to a clause in Colorado’s state constitution that limited voting to white men. When frustrated fellow Radicals pointed out that there were only ninety black men in the entire territory, Sumner was unmoved. He wanted to establish a precedent, he said. “No more states with inequality of rights!”
Colleagues made the mistake of suggesting that it would be expedient for him to back down. To that, Sumner had a pat answer: “Nothing can be expedient that is not right.”
• • •
Besides putting forth the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, the Committee of Fifteen had been sifting through 140 proposals for legislation, nearly half of them aimed at guaranteeing political rights for black men.
Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, once a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, had not broken with his successor. He went to the White House as a conservative Republican to consult with Johnson about a civil rights bill that would rectify the wrongs of the Dred Scott decision. Its central provision would make it a criminal offense to deny a black man his civil rights, although those rights would not extend to allowing him to vote.
Charles Sumner likened the current debate to the fight over Kansas with its near-fatal consequences for him. “Congress must dare to be brave! It must dare to be just!”
Sumner rejected the argument that civil rights were an issue best left to the states. Freedom for the Negroes cannot “be entrusted to the old slave-masters embittered against their slaves. It must be performed by the national Government.”
At the White House, Trumbull was pleased by Johnson’s seeming support for his bill, but within the president’s cabinet, response was mixed. Henry Seward and Secretary of War Stanton were among those who thought that some legislation was necessary but that sections of the bill, as written, might be unconstitutional. Only Navy Secretary Welles flatly opposed it.
To his diary, Welles acknowledged his feeling about the black man: “I do not want him at my table, nor do I care to have him in the jury-box or in the legislative halls, or on the bench.”
When Trumbull’s bill reached him on March 26, 1866, Johnson sided with Gideon Welles and vetoed it.
• • •
Trumbull complained loudly that he had been deceived. Other conservative Republicans, recalling that Johnson had raised no objections to the bill in their private meetings, shared Trumbull’s sense of betrayal and made futile trips to the White House.
Illinois representative Shelby Cullom urged the president to smooth over his differences with those congressmen who wanted to remain loyal to him. “I will never forget that interview,” Cullom said later. Johnson “gave us to understand that we were on a fool’s errand, and that he would not yield.”
Cullom returned to the Capitol, joined reluctantly with the Radicals, and reconciled himself to voting with them from that point forward.
As a result, when an attempt was made to override Johnson’s veto, Thaddeus Stevens could count on votes that had shifted since Congress failed with the Freedmen’s Bureau six weeks earlier.
Democrats tried to postpone the vote because two senators who supported Johnson were ailing, but Ben Wade scoffed at their appeal:
“I will tell the President and everyone else, that if God Almighty has stricken one member so that he cannot be here to uphold the dictation of a despot, I thank Him for His interposition, and I will take advantage of it if I can.”
One of those absent members was brought to the Senate floor on a stretcher, an exertion that was unavailing. With one senator absent, Johnson’s veto of the civil rights bill was overturned thirty-three to fifteen.
Julia Grant
CHAPTER 8
THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (1866)
ON THE FIRST DAY OF May 1866, several hundred black soldiers recently released from service were waiting at a fort outside Memphis for their back pay before they headed home. They had already turned in their weapons, and that evening many of them were singing as they went toward the taverns on South Street.
They knew that the city’s heart remained with the Confederacy. A friend of Thaddeus Stevens had sent him an item from the Memphis Avalanche that protested the Radicals’ proposal “to give a greasy, filthy stinking negro” the right to vote. And since the largely Irish police force seemed to share that opinion, the soldiers
were alert for signs of trouble.
Speculating about reasons for the hostility, Tennessee’s governor had concluded that for Southern white men, a black soldier “constantly reminds them of their defeat, and of what they call ‘a just but lost cause.’ And the sight of him in enjoyment of freedom is a constant source of irritation.”
When a collision of horse-drawn carts gave police officers a reason to arrest two black drivers but let the white drivers go free, loud protests broke out among the soldiers. One shouted the inflammatory words: “Abe Lincoln!”
A police officer shouted back, “Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned.”
Facts afterward were hard to come by. Several black soldiers had apparently kept their weapons. They shot at the police, who fired back. When the gun smoke cleared, four soldiers and two policemen were dead.
By the time police reinforcements could arrive, the soldiers had run back to their barracks at Fort Pickering. Outraged, the police surrounded the fort, spurred on by John C. Creighton, a city judge. Witnesses quoted him as calling, “Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill the last damned one of the nigger race, and burn up the cradle!”
Storming the surrounding black neighborhood, police and their accomplices set fire to ninety cabins and twelve schoolhouses. A gang of seven, including two Memphis policemen, broke into the house of Frances Thompson, a Negro washerwoman, and a sixteen-year-old girl, Lucy, who lived with her. They demanded supper, and after they had finished the eggs, ham, and biscuits she prepared for them, they said they wanted a woman to sleep with.
“I said we were not that sort of women,” Frances Thompson testified later. “They said that ‘didn’t make a damned bit of difference.’ One of them hit me on the side of my face and, holding my throat, choked me.”
The men drew their pistols and said that if the women resisted, they would shoot them and set fire to their house. Four men raped Frances Thompson, and the others raped Lucy.
Reports from the scene indicated that another three black women were raped that night during a shooting spree that wounded at least seventy Negroes. Forty-six black men, three women, and two children were murdered outright.
In Washington, Thaddeus Stevens called for a full investigation. But apologists for the Memphis police pointed out that wartime New York had seen far worse mayhem on July 13, 1863, when mobs of white workingmen had rioted to protest being called up for service in the Union army. They had complained then that wealthy young men could pay a three-hundred-dollar “commutation fee” that would exempt them.
White workers already resented having to compete for jobs with emancipated blacks, and they had become convinced that the war was being fought to free the slaves, not to preserve the Union.
At that time, Lincoln had dispatched several regiments of militia and volunteers to New York, but before order could be restored at least 120 persons had been killed and 2,000 wounded—possibly more. A black orphanage had been burned to the ground, although the children escaped.
Senate Republicans rejected the New York comparison since the authorities there had suppressed the riot, while in Memphis the police had instigated it.
Two weeks after the bloodshed, the Tennessee legislature moved to prevent a repetition by transferring control of the police in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga to three commissioners appointed by the governor. Anyone interfering with that chain of command would face criminal charges.
• • •
Much as Stevens might deplore the loss of life, he hoped to use Northern outrage to toughen a proposed Fourteenth Amendment currently being debated. In an early version, the amendment would forbid discrimination based on race and forbid any bar to Negroes voting—but only after July 4, 1876.
The proposal would also outlaw paying the Confederate debt, and it authorized Congress to enforce its terms. But William Fessenden, as chairman of the Committee of Fifteen, was absent due to varioloid, a mild form of smallpox, and other committee members were resisting the suffrage clause, even though it was to be deferred for ten years.
Stevens upbraided them—“Damn their cowardice”—but he went along with the deletions.
Charles Sumner again promised to resist compromise. He had already warned the amendment’s author, Robert Dale Owen of Indiana, “I must do my duty, without looking to the consequences.”
In this case, however, Sumner’s call to duty was somewhat muted. Because of political rivalries at home in Massachusetts, he had found himself backed into opposing the amendment. Since he had introduced very similar legislation himself, Sumner’s reasoning was convoluted, and when his bill died, even fellow Radicals had mocked his failure to pass any legislation at all after more than two decades in the Senate.
And yet Sumner could not be ignored. During the fight for the civil rights bill, Sumner had lobbied for it incessantly and could share in the credit for repudiating President Johnson.
As the Fourteenth Amendment headed for a showdown, Sumner was prepared to vote for it, but he covered his backtracking with a florid speech:
“Show me a creature, with lifted countenance looking to heaven, made in the image of God, and I show you a MAN, who, of whatever country or race, whether browned by equatorial sun or blanched by northern cold, is with you a child of the Heavenly Father, and equal with you in all the rights of Human Nature.”
Sumner also might have pointed out an inconsistency that his fellow Radicals were willing to overlook. They demanded that the Southern states ratify the amendment in order to qualify for admission to the Union, even though only members of the Union could ratify a constitutional amendment.
Sumner’s vote on June 8, 1866, for adopting the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the thirty-three ayes to eleven nays, more than the required two-thirds vote.
In the House, Thaddeus Stevens deplored the weakened language but also voted for the amendment, which passed 120 to 32, with 32 abstentions. Stevens took consolation in reminding himself that he was living among men, not angels.
• • •
While Congress struggled with its amendment, black men in New Orleans were moving their cause forward in the local arena. They had been included in organizing the Union Republican Party of Louisiana, and once the state had its legitimacy restored, they hurried to elect a representative before the reconstructed legislature backed by Johnson could take its own action.
To send to the House, pragmatic black leaders sacrificed the symbolism of sending one of their number and supported instead a sympathetic white man named Henry Clay Warmoth.
Glib, charming, and only twenty-three, Warmoth was one of those impoverished Union army officers who were migrating from the North. Coming to make their fortunes in the new South, they expected a grateful welcome from the Negroes they had helped free.
White Southerners watched with contempt and envy as men arrived with everything they owned in suitcases stitched from cut-up rugs. As the interlopers began a steady ascent in business and politics, the defeated rebels could only sneer at them as “carpetbaggers.” Equally despicable to them were the white turncoats who were cooperating with these Northern scavengers in undermining the foundations of the Old South. Such men were “scalawags.”
Warmoth had arrived in Louisiana only the previous year, but black voters were content to test their power by electing him, carpetbagger or not. Warmoth received nearly twice as many votes as Lincoln had stipulated were needed to legitimize a state’s government.
Once in Washington, he was seated promptly in the House of Representatives at the same time that Thaddeus Stevens and his Radicals were blocking the entry of men from President Johnson’s legislatures.
Louisiana’s governor, J. Madison Wells, was torn between his past loyalty to the Union—he had opposed secession—and the plantation owners who were as hostile as he was to Negro suffrage. Those former slave owners were embracing the Black Codes and pressing Wells to restore the state constitution as it had existed before the war.
To chart the future,
the governor called a convention for July 30, 1866, at Mechanics’ Institute in New Orleans. Perhaps delegates could reach a compromise: Voting rights might be extended to Negroes, but only those who were deemed intelligent and who owned property.
Governor Wells got no backing for the idea from New Orleans officials. Mayor John Monroe told the local Union army commander that he intended to prevent the assembly, and the police chief was known to be arming men from his secret society, “The Southern Cross Association.”
The association harked back to a prewar New Orleans group formed by the Know-Nothing Party and known simply as “Thugs.” In disguises and carrying brass knuckles, Thugs had stormed into immigrant neighborhoods to scare off potential voters.
Wells was enough alarmed by the threats of violence to warn the president about the sort of “diabolical outrages” once perpetrated by the Thugs. But Johnson was taking advice from a former rebel and declined to recommend action.
The organizers of the convention heard about the widespread threats and moved their opening session from nighttime to noon. Even so, the city’s police force was lying in wait, listening for the signal of a pistol shot. Hearing it, they marched down Dryades Street, burst into the hall, and took aim directly at the delegates.
Anthony Dostie, a dentist from New York, tried to reassure the audience by taking up an American flag and shouting, “Keep quiet! We have here the emblem of the United States. They cannot fire upon us when we have this emblem!”
But a policeman cried, “Damn that dirty rag!” A woman with the police called out, “Those dirty Yankees were sent down here to destroy us! And those niggers! Kill them! Don’t let one of them get away!”
Dostie had delivered a fiery speech to a black audience three days earlier, and he was one of the first to die, shot in the spine, then run through with a sword.
The Reverend J. W. Horton, a New England clergyman, pulled out his white handkerchief and waved it at the uniformed police charging toward him. “Gentlemen!” he cried. “I beseech you to stop firing! We are non-combatants!”
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